THE SIMPSONS NEWS

Not much to write about THIS week.  I managed to finish up Act 1 of show 12 last Friday and this week I’ve been working on Act 3.

The big news for me was that my old board revisions partner has decided to go freelance and is no longer doing  board revisions.  This meant that another person took his place. A SIMPSONS veteran from a while back.  Last week was his first week and he’s playing catch up on how everything works the same way I did when I first started.  Wish him the best.

ART

(For those of you coming in late to these posts, if you want to read what my project is about, CLICK HERE to learn about the general world the story takes place in, and CLICK HERE if you want to know the story itself.)

I’ve been really trying to get the coloring of the drawing done.  It’s pretty much there. I’ll need to add and clean up a few things but this is pretty much the way it will look:

Once I do the slight adjustments, I’m going to begin experimenting on the movement.  I painted it all using Storyboard Pro.  I’m not sure how much all the line work is going to slow down the program. I hope it’s not much, otherwise, this was all for nothing, or at the very least, will take me longer to do if I need to use another program.  I hope I can do what I need to do.

What I did above was, take my old value study:

and used it as a guide for my colors.  It helped a TON and I’m going to do it again with just about everything I do with color from now on.  It took a lot of the guess work out of what I needed to do next and how I need to approach coloring it.

MOVIES

A lot has been said about how 2D, hand drawn animation, is dead. It is now obvious to me that the people who say that, haven’t watched THE SECRET OF KELLS.

THE SECRET OF KELLS is a movie the glorifies and thrives on it’s hand drawn, nature. Taking it’s art direction from illuminated manuscripts from the middle ages (specifically, The Book of Kells) THE SECRET OF KELLS bombards you with moving art like no movie has ever done.

I watched the movie awestruck at how beautiful it all was.  I couldn’t believe it.  I would have wept if it wasn’t for the fact that the story kept me my attention well enough so that it stopped me from doing so.

That brings me to the other thing that blew me away.  The story wasn’t based on a fairytale (though it has a fairy in it) and wasn’t a musical.  It wasn’t what most western animated mainstream movies tend to be about. Heck, it wasn’t even what most Anime tend to be about.  This movie was about the very odd subject of monks writing an illuminated manuscript of the four Gospels historically called, The Book of Kells.  It’s also the story about an abbot who’s lost touch with what’s truly important, while he tries desperately to defend his community from the coming of the viking marauders. The main character of the story is a boy who’s caught in between the love and obedience he has for his uncle the abbot and his love for illuminating manuscripts.

I loved it.  Especially since I love the middle ages.  It’s the only non Catholic animated movie I’ve ever seen that treats religious life as a normal way of life and makes no judgments upon it.

I can’t say enough good things about this movie. If you haven’t watched this movie, you owe it to yourself to do so.

THE SECRET OF KELLS proves that 2D hand drawn animation isn’t dead.  Why? Well, even though CG can do many wonderful things, there is no way that a CG film could capture the 2 dimensional artistry that THE SECRET OF KELLS has produced.

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